Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

TWO FROM ANDREW YOUNG

 

This may come as a surprise to some readers, but there are those times when I can find nothing profound, interesting or topical to say in these “Something Thoughtful” slots. On such occasions I resort to my old wile of presenting you with a poem or two that I admire or find appealing. So here we go again.

I first discovered the poetry of Andrew Young when I was a rookie teacher, using as a class tetbook an anthology of modern British poetry, Poetry 1900 to 1965,  compiled in the late 1960s by the critic George MacBeth. Amidst the selections from Yeats, Eliot, Auden and other luminaries, there was a modest selection of the poems of Andrew Young, of whom I had never heard before. MacBeth’s brief introduction to Young told me that his poetry was often mistaken for mere Georgian pastoralism, but that it actually grappled with religious issues, almost in the manner of the Metaphysics.

Thus it appeared to me once I began to read it.

A little further research told me that Andrew Young (1885-1971) began writing poetry as a serious young Presbyterian Scot, and was ordained as a minister of the very conservative branch of Presbyterianism, the Free Church of Scotland. But his theological views gradually changed over the years and in middle age he was accepted into the Anglican church and became a canon of Chichester Cathedral in England.

Young’s poems have a deceptive simplicity. You think you are dealing only with landscape, and then you get bitten and understand where Young is really taking you.

So here are two of his poems.

I like the first simply because of its clever inversion. Our human sense of how the world should be interpreted is turned upside-down. But then, of course, that calls into question our place on the Earth in the first place.

A Dead Mole

Strong-shouldered mole,
That so much lived below the ground,
Dug, fought and loved, hunted and fed,
For you to raise a mound
Was as for us to make a hole;
What wonder now that being dead
Your body lies here stout and square
Buried within the blue vault of the air?

But the poem by Young that really hooked me was The Fear. There can be few people who, on a solitary walk, haven’t imagined that something or someone is following them. We turn around and see… nothing. That is where Young begins, but read closely and you see he takes us to reflexions on body and soul; this life and a possible afterlife or other-life. Some part of us will always feel alienated from the physical world that we inhabit – that strong sense of being in, but not fully of, the world. Indeed it is this impulse that is at the heart of rationalist (as opposed to empiricist) thought. And lest anyone be annoyed at the religious sense of what I’ve here written, may I point out that another Scotsman, that sturdy Marxist atheist Hugh MacDiarmid, also wrote a poem about the alienation of human mind from physical nature. His poem is a long, discursive piece, running over many pages and with much obscure vocabulary, called “On a Raised Beach”. A worthy effort, but somehow Andrew Young got there more concisely and more memorably.

The Fear

How often I turn round

To face the beast that bound by bound

Leaps on me from behind,

Only to see a bough that heaves

With sudden gust of wind

Or blackbird raking withered leaves.

 

A dog may find me out

Or badger toss a white-lined snout;

And one day as I softly trod

Looking for nothing stranger than

A fox or stoat I met a man

And even that seemed not too odd.

 

And yet in any place I go

I watch and listen as all creatures do

For what I cannot see or hear,

For something warns me everywhere

That even in my land of birth

I trespass on the earth.